The present invention relates to a vehicle lavatory, in particular an aircraft lavatory, comprising a cabin and a urinal unit. The cabin has a circumferential wall surrounding a cabin interior space and defining a central vertical axis extending through said cabin interior space, wherein said circumferential wall includes an entrance wall section and a sanitary wall section spaced from said entrance wall section.
In vehicle construction and in particular in aircraft construction a permanent objective is to maximize the vehicle interior space intended for receiving passengers while reducing the vehicle interior space consumed by infrastructural facilities, such as lavatories, galleys or aisles. At the same time, the standard of comfort of these infrastructural facilities should be remained as high as possible in order to please the passengers. These both—generally conflicting—objectives are addressed by the present invention.
In order to reduce the space consumed by lavatories in aircraft construction and for comfort reasons ideas have come up to provide aircraft lavatories with a urinal. So far, lavatories comprising a urinal are considerably uncommon in aircraft construction, as lavatories merely comprising a urinal and no toilet may primarily be used by male passengers and lavatories comprising both toilet and urinal would be inefficient in view of desired low space consumption.
However, from DE 10 2009 034 406 A1 an aircraft lavatory is known which indeed comprises both a toilet and a urinal, wherein the associated lavatory cabin may be expanded or shrunk depending on the specific application, such that in the expanded state enough space for both toilet and urinal is provided. The aircraft lavatory disclosed in DE 10 2009 034 406 A1 is formed by an expandable cabin comprising a circumferential wall having an entrance wall section and a sanitary wall section.
It appears that the space consumed by aircraft lavatories can be reduced in a reasonable manner by replacing two adjacent lavatories each including a toilet by one lavatory including a toilet and one lavatory including a urinal instead of a toilet. A lavatory including a urinal instead of a toilet may be formed with a reduced width compared to a lavatory including a toilet, as the urinal unit is less space consuming. However, in order to gain a considerable benefit from such lavatory arrangement, for example by including an additional row of seats into the passenger cabin, the interior space of the lavatory which includes the urinal has to be substantially smaller, i.e. the floor area of the interior space has to be substantially narrower, than of the lavatory including a toilet. The lavatory arrangement known from DE 10 2009 034 406 A1 cannot be sufficiently reduced in size so as to fulfil these requirements, even if the toilet would be left out.